Rift Rides
by Serinity46
Summary: On an amusement park on Europa, there's something called The Challenge, but when humans are going missing, it may not be an innocent competition after all. And why's the park called Rift Rides? 2nd Sharada Storm story. Ten, self-insert OC, Donna, Leela.
1. Chapter 1

_Things that were found out from the Rift Rides/Europa trip... _

_#1: The TARDIS is big, __**really** big..._

"Don't tell me you're sorry cuz you're not…you're only sorry you got caught…so go on and take a bow..." Standing at the TARDIS kitchen fridge looking into its depths desperately for something to eat, Sharada quietly sung a part of some song which was in her head at the moment. She thought she looked quite shit at the moment, really, having been wearing the same thing which she'd been wearing before she fell asleep in the first unused bedroom she came across and with her hair probably all over the place in odd knots and angles that would put Azkaban!Bellatrix to shame, but it didn't matter, there wasn't anyone else in the kitchen besides her right now.

Where the other three, The Doctor, Donna, and Leela, were? She had no idea, and she'd discovered that the TARDIS was much much bigger than she could have ever imagined. Seriously. She'd've been in new clothes if she could've actually _found_ the wardrobe, which she'd been looking for with no luck for nearly twenty minutes after she got up. Considering giving the directions that the Doctor had given Rose in the one episode a go, Sharada then decided to go and find that bit of Unquiet Dead on her laptop to go see how exactly you got to the wardrobe from the console room, but then found she couldn't even find the bedroom, where her laptop was, again. She did, however, find the kitchen, and that's where she stood, leafing through the fridge and deciding what she wanted to eat. And singing, of course, much like she did in her own kitchen back home when no one else was in it.

"…But you put on quite a show, really had me going…" Singing whatever lyrics she could remember (which really were just the same few over and over again), she drew out a bagged loaf of bread and a package of raw bacon and looked to the stove near the fridge.

"…The hell are pans?" Sharada wondered aloud, always a bit rubbish at finding anything in other people's kitchens.

"Bottom drawer, to your left." A voice, the Doctor's, sounded from someplace else in the kitchen behind Sharada.

"Hey, this is real bacon, right? From Earth pigs," Sharada turned to him, as he entered into the kitchen, holding up the pack of it in her hand, "Not, like, weird alien meat?"

"Well, the Paytaas from Zyrof 4 _do_ look a bit like pigs…" The Doctor said, leaning casually against the island and looking to Sharada and the bacon, purely for the completely squicked look that was now on her face. "No, it is real bacon, from a Tesco actually." He finally told her.

"I'm so not cooking any for you now," Sharada laughed, since she'd actually totally believed him for a second. After throwing a few pieces onto the black frying pan that she'd unearthed from the drawer that he'd said they were in, she looked back over to the Doctor, who was now looking for something in the cupboard above the island. "No, really, d'you want any? Cuz I can cook some."

"Nah, not really that into donkey…forgot to say, that was a 31st century Tesco, they-" He began to tell her some total rubbish about the bacon again, but broke off abruptly at the feel of a bag of bread colliding with his arm from the other side of the island. "Okay, okay, it's a _pig_, from the 21st century, happy?"

"It smells normal." Sharada said, inhaling the scent of the sizzling bacon, which she loved. A thought crossed her mind that she'd wondered once before, "Do they even have pigs and cows and stuff in space? Like, what'do aliens do for a Teen Burger…or do they have totally different food? Hmm…I want to go to space, yeah, something _really_ alien. And now I want a Teen Burger. Can the TARDIS just make food? Like one of those creepy superhouses?" She paused for a second and looked to the ceiling of the room, hoping she hadn't offended the TARDIS. "Not that you're creepy…" She told the TARDIS, wondering if she could hear her, "Mean, though…thought you were supposed to make it easy for people to find what were looking for, like in the fanfics?"

Sharada got no voice of response from the TARDIS, though the stove, which was quite tech, very different from the simple model in her family's kitchen back home, turned the heat on the burner she was using off on its own accord.

"Your awesome ship hates me," She said simply, looking over at the Doctor. Glancing down, she noticed that the bacon was done, though…_bloody hell, the TARDIS cooked stuff fast_, she thought.

The Doctor came over beside Sharada and took a look at the stove.

"Bacon setting," He said, stealing a crisp, greasy strip of, yes, regular bacon, out of the pan. "It…does that. Or it has, ever since that one time when she asked it to."

"She? The TARDIS?" Sharada asked, eating a piece of, _her_, by the way, bacon.

The Doctor, shoving slices of toast into a toaster (which, unlike the stove, was very _not_ tech, and looked like he'd picked it up straight out of the 1970's…which Sharada assumed he most likely had…unless the TARDIS just sort of _grew_ furniture… there were so many things about his world that she didn't actually know, she'd found) shook his head.

"Ro-" He began to say, but was drowned out by a loud, amazed, yell coming from somewhere down the hallway from the kitchen.

"YOU _STILL_ _HAVE_ THIS?!" Leela's voice rang out from elsewhere in the TARDIS, which was quickly followed by a second, equally loud, and amazed for a completely different reason, voice from the same direction.

"YOU _ACTUALLY WORE_ THAT?!" Donna's voice was heard through a peal of laughter. "God, no wonder she was amazed he didn't trip over it! And who the hell wore _that_? It's like someone cut up eight ugly coats and shoved them into one!"

Sharada looked to direction that the sound of Donna and Leela was coming from, then to the Doctor.

"Wardrobe's that way?" She pointed, then happily broke into a run out of the kitchen towards it.

_Just down the hallway…the entire time the wardrobe's been just a hallway away from the kitchen?! I swear this place is just a bit Hogwarts_…Sharada thought, ecstatic as she came to where she could visibly see an open door.

"Wow…it's like a giant Winners." Sharada said in awe the second she stepped through the doorway to join Leela and Donna in the TARDIS wardrobe. It was like a costume shop meets a Winners, all jammed wall-to-wall with racks sporting various looks and garments. Some of them she recognized as belonging to the Doctor, or from some past companion or another, but most were completely new to her. And huge…did she mention it was completely huge?

"…And a cat pin! There's a _cat pin_ on this, too!" Donna continued, incredulous, looking at what Sharada knew to be the Sixth Doctor's coat. Noticing that Sharada had entered the room, Donna looked over to her, laughing. "Tell me this isn't the Doctor's…it _is_ his though, isn't it!? Oh my god…"

"Sixth Doctor." Sharada confirmed, nodding furiously through laughter as she too had no clue on Earth how anybody, even the Doctor, could've thought that looking like a circus clown was a _good_ idea.

"It doesn't get worse than this, does it?" Donna asked, holding up the aforementioned trench jacket that seemed to be made of chunks of every mismatching pattern imaginable.

"I don't think so," Sharada shook her head, "…Unless you want to see the pants?"

"There's _pants_ to this?!" Donna burst, not having even considered yet that the coat, bad enough on its own, was part of an entire _outfit_ that the Doctor once wore. "And what's with the question marks?"

"I think they were striped…I'm not sure though, but something weird like that," Sharada looked around the nearby racks to try and spot the pants, then paused as she thought of something else. "Ooh…have you seen the question mark jumper yet?"

"Is this it?" Leela, who currently had the Fourth Doctor's long striped scarf draped several times around her own neck, held up something yellow with many red question marks and green zigzags emblazoned in repeating a stripe pattern that he wore in his Seventh form.

"Yeah, that's it," Sharada smiled with a slight laugh, thrilled to actually be seeing all of this stuff in person. "Hey, where's the normal clothes? D'ya know?" She asked the other two, peering like a ferret over the sea of clothes to try and spot anything to wear.

Leela thought for a second, then recalled where she'd seen what looked like part of a boutique before.

"That way," Leela pointed down a small isle between two racks that were just behind her, "Past that row of old dresses, left at the sombrero, and, er…just keep going, you'll find it."

* * *

"Anywhere is good enough, hook me up…" Sharada, having re-found her room, as well as a shower and a breakfast of more than just two strips of bacon, brushed her damp hair into a ponytail with her hands, thankfully having found some new clothes.

On the top of a small dresser in the room which she'd fallen asleep in, her laptop sat, currently with the iTunes on shuffle, mostly because she'd been wondering a few minutes ago if it would translate the French parts of the Superbus songs she had, which it didn't.

Shutting off the music, and her laptop, Sharada left it and bolted quickly from the bedroom, heading towards the console room, which, if she remembered, was very to it.

"Doctor," She called, spotting that he was already in it, as were Leela and K9, though Donna wasn't. "Where're we going?" She asked, kind of to say 'jeans, red spaghetti strapped tank top, weird awesome fake suede green boots I found that remind me of an elf…fine for where we're going, right?'

"No idea," He said, looking up over to her from where he was bent over the metallic dog. "…I was thinking 60th Century Europa, _big_ intergalactic tourist spot, loads of 'alien'."

"Sounds great," Sharada beamed, which the Doctor returned. "So when're we leaving?"

Extraordinarily looking forward to seeing something space and alien in real life, she came across the gold-colored metal grated floor and took to a kneel by him and K9.

"Soon, just as soon as I've fixed the block in his memory, nearly done, just have one more-" The Doctor began to say peering in concentration through his glasses at some random part of the mechanics of the dog's innards, then grabbed Sharada's hand, which had moved to pat K9's nozzle, suddenly. He looked to her, serious. "Don't touch him."

"Why not? Ooh, is he still doing that time bouncing thing?" She asked, assuming, since what had happened the other couple of times that she, or others, had been touching K9.

"He thinks so," Leela, who'd been sitting at the battered captain's chair for a moment, got up with a sigh. She was in her usual outfit of a tight tank top and a skimpy skirt made from animal skins, though no longer wearing the Fourth Doctor's long scarf as she'd been when Sharada had last seen her about fifteen-ish minutes ago in the wardrobe room. "And so does K9…where's Donna, anyways?"

"Dunno," The Doctor shrugged, standing up from the repaired K9, "It's TARDIS, not the Big Brother house."

"Ooh, I'd pay for _those_ Live Feeds," Sharada commented, "Bet a lot of people would. You should _so_ sell that to the fans one day…just, 24 hour feeds of your life," She laughed. "Call it 'stalk the Doctor'."

"You know, not sure I'd like you fans seeing _ever_y thing I do," The Doctor said, both amused and slightly terrified by the prospect of TARDIS Live Feeds.

"One word, Doctor…_fanfic_," Sharada said pointedly, giggling as she recalled a few she'd read.

"Oh, well that's just you lot making things up, it's, it's not _really_, I'm not…" He began, trailing off at the arrival of Donna, and hoping to change the subject, however, he had no such luck.

"You," Donna said to the Doctor, "Are a slutboi in fanfiction."

"You've read fanfics?" Was the Doctor's surprised response to what Donna had just said.

"Well, yeah," Donna admitted, "When I was looking for stuff about you and all that online before the Adipose stuff, what else do you think I found? Fanfic! Oh... I remember this one, with you and one of those Dalek things…not sure how _that_ worked, really… have you seen that one?"

Donna looked over, past the Doctor, at Sharada with that last question.

"No! Where is it? Oh my God I have to read that… There was one I saw where the Doctor, Jack, Martha, and a Weevil-" Sharada began.

"Right, Europa!" The Doctor, began to throw a few switches around the console, sending the center of it moving up and down with the familiar mechanic whooshing whirr, before the two could get any more into that.

Expecting it, but still not, Sharada lost her footing slightly and stumbled to the side into Leela, but managed, surprisingly, to stay upright through the rockyness, silently squeeing like mad that she was actually in the TARDIS, traveling in time and space.

Gradually, it slowed off, coming in for an unusually smooth landing as the sound and movement of the greenish pillar came to a halt. She really, really had no words at this except for, "Oh my God, eeeeeeee!"

"Europa…" Sharada said, in awe, smiling hugely, before even seeing the place. "A _planet_! Oh my God…It's _planet_ out there. That's not Earth, a _planet_, in _space_, eeee!"

She jumped, on the spot, throwing her arms suddenly around the Doctor in joy and thankfulness. She loved him, she really did.

_#2: Introducing cannon companions to Doctor Who fans does not bode well for the Doctor's dignity... _

* * *

A/N: I've decided to re-work things about these first few chapters a little bit, to fit with where I've finally decided to go with the plotline in this fic.

The two songs who's lyrics get mentioned in this chapter? I own neither. They are 'Take A Bow' by Rihanna and 'Hook Me Up' by The Veronicas. I also do not own Superbus, or the idea of the US Big Brother Live Feeds ;p Hell, I don't even own the Live Feeds, period.

Oh...and those are not real fanfics. Maybe they are, somewhere, some Doctor/Dalek thing or a Doctor/Jack/Martha/Weevil, but I've never seen them if they do exist (god, they probably DO hehe), anyways...I just didn't want to mention any specific fics in that part there.


	2. Chapter 2

"It's actually a moon," The Doctor said, close to Sharada in her hug of squee as he hugged her back.

"Whatever, its _space_, in the _future_…can't wait to see some aliens." She said as she broke off from the Time Lord, purely loving the fact that she'd just hugged Ten, by the way. Sharada rushed quickly to the doors, pushing it open with a creak that she'd heard before and stepping out of the TARDIS and onto the glittering black stone pavement before her. It was surprisingly warm, for space.

"Holy shit…it's like an alien PNE." Sharada said, as the others quickly joined her outside on Europa's surface (though neither of them, except maybe the Doctor, knew what she meant by the Vancouverite thing she'd mentioned at first). From all directions, groups of both humans and every species of alien imaginable were clustered in crowds; walking around or lined up for various rides, shops, and food stalls. In the distance, she could hear roller coaster screams…huh, so aliens screamed on rides, too.

"Rift Rides?" Leela, spotting several neon blue and yellow logos with those words emblazoned on them, read.

"Why's it called Rift Rides?" Sharada asked, wondering if it had anything to do with the Cardiff Rift.

"This whole place runs off of Rift energy, a bit like the TARDIS," Was the Doctor's answer to this, as all three companions looked 'round in awe at things in every direction. Yes, it was a theme park, but it was a very alien one.

"Six tickets for two Byros…" From in front of them, an alien, which looked something like a cross between a greyhound, a kangaroo, and a gecko, with a curled spines down his back and a bright blue and yellow cap which bore the mountainous 'Rift Rides' logo on his head, began to advertise to them, upon spotting the four. "Costs two to ride the Regal, four for the Sizzler, one for anything else!"

"You're so…alien, you're, like, an _alien_,you're all…_alien_!" Sharada blurt high-pitchedly to the green-skinned ticket vendor, whose nametag bore the words 'Brinker'.

"Excuse me?" The alien, Brinker, said, looking less than amused at the ditzy human.

"Sorry," She apologized hastily, but still ecstatic and squeal-ey. "It's just I've never seen an alien before in person! I'm from Earth," She smiled and shrugged, as if it were an excuse.

"Another dumb human, what else is new," Brinker huffed. "And I suppose you're going to try to buy the tickets in some stupid kind of paper Earth money, too."

_Wow…one more person who thinks I'm dumb…that's a shocker_, Sharada thought, a certain sarcastic 'laughing at herself' look on her face, though she didn't say anything.

"You should be lucky if we're going to pay you anything at all for them," Donna began to say, fired, "If you're going to be going around calling your customers 'dumb humans', which, by the way, she isn't, and neither are Leela and I, have you got that, alien boy?"

"You know what? I will be willing to give you lot free tickets… _if_ you three humans and one… whatever he is, because you didn't mention him so I'm assuming he's not human," Brinker told Donna, "Are willing to participate in a little challenge."

"_The_ Challenge?" The Doctor asked, to this, "I've heard of The Challenge, never done it before, but..."

"What's 'The Challenge'?" Donna asked, forcefully reminded of a Fear Factor-type thing she'd seen at a carnival once before, where people would eat some kind of a bug in order to get free tickets. If that was it, she would _not_ be doing whatever 'The Challenge' was.

"Oh, nothing much, just a list of things, and if you four complete it, you win something free." Brinker said, cheerily again, and dug into the pocket of his 'Rift Rides' uniform polo. He handed a copy of his list to each of them.

Sharada looked at it, and giggled slightly when she saw it.

"Seriously? You want us to do this stuff?" She said, kind of amused, really.

As Leela glanced down at her paper, she saw it was a numbered list of annoying things to do in an amusement park.

"It could be kind of fun, to try some of these out… do we have to do _all_ of them, for the free thing?" Leela asked, because it was around 100 things that they'd have to do.

"I bet you give this to all the tourists," Donna commented, reading through the tasks, though she smiled.

"If the three of you want to do this, I'm game for it, too," The Doctor told Leela, Sharada, and Donna, shrugging slightly, since some of the stuff on the list looked funny to do (and watch them do, he would love to see them do some of this stuff, now that he thought of it), plus they were getting free tickets out of the deal.

"Yeah, I'll do it." Sharada said. She'd seen lists like this before on the internet… maybe this was some kind of a reality show, she wondered… ooh, like the Big Brother challenges in the UK version!

Donna and Leela both agreed to it as well.

"Don't you have to give us a few tickets to get us _on_ to the rides?" Donna asked Brinker, "Cause some of these you have to do while you're on them."

"Aah, you do… but cause you're on The Challenge, you'll get on for free. Here, just show these," Brinker handed them each a large token with the date and the logo for both 'Rift Rides' and 'The Challenge: Do it if you dare' imprinted onto it. "And hang on a sec," He dug out a device from inside of a pocket and began to speak into it.

"Four new entrants to The Challenge," Brinker was saying into the communicator to somebody, "Three Human, one... something else, and two smell of Earthlings, copy?"

With a click, Brinker shut off the communication part of the device, and pressed upon a button to the side of it. Four small metal orbs flickered into the air just above Leela, Donna, Sharada, and the Doctor.

"What're those for?" Leela, looking up at the floating silver bulbs, asked.

"Cameras," Brinker answered, simply, "How else would we know how much you've done when you come to claim your prize?"

"It's like we're on City Chase," Sharada commented, a glance to the orbs which followed after them, as they began to set off.

"I've actually sort of always wanted to try to do The Challenge," The Doctor admitted.

* * *

"I'll bet this whole thing just turns out to be a scam and he doesn't even give us our 'free something'… still, who's up for what?" Donna, looking at the lengthy list, said.

"Oohh, I'll take #1… Doctor, you mind being the one standing behind me in line?" Sharada said, eagerly, as she read the first one.

"I don't think that's how that one works," The Doctor said, though he had no objection to getting into a snog with her. "I think it means just whoever happens to be there, not someone in your group."

"So? And you can be the random person who's waiting behind me." Sharada laughed, "But whatever, I'll still do it, next time I'm in line and some hot guy's standing behind me."

"You don't get all the good ones!" Leela exclaimed, taking a look at the list, "But you know, we can do a lot of these at the same time, like… 1, 2, 4, and 21. We each take one of them, and do it on that coaster right there."

Leela pointed to a wooden roller coaster nearby to them. This could be fun, really. Plus, they were riding it for free, even if they did or didn't do the tasks at all, really.

_#3: Sometimes, we're too trusting._

* * *

A/n: Huh, so yeah, I dunno if this chapter was a bit OOC, but anyways, there is a plot to it, them doing The Challenge, it'll lead somewhere. And for you lot who don't know what they are... City Chase is a thing where people have to run around a city (i think they are Canadian cities, but maybe they've got it in the USA too?) doing a bunch of tasks, kind of like a mini Amazing Race, and the PNE is an amusement park in Vancouver, Canada... it's like BC's ONLY amusement park, I think. And Guatemala will be coming not in this fic, but somewhere later in the post-series 4 stories, and that's when I'm gonna include Jack (& Martha).


	3. Chapter 3

_#4: We're kinda shit at 'The Challenge'…but still annoying enough on our own terms. (And betting on your companion's country of origin is very fail, Doctor).  
_

"The Doctor's an alien," Donna was saying, amusedly teasingly to Sharada, as they, along with the Doctor and Leela, stood in the long-winding line for the wooden coaster entitled, The Regal.

"Yeah, but he doesn't look like _calamari_," Sharada, with a large look of taking this none too seriously on her face, countered, rather loudly, "Savin' it, for when I get some hot European athlete looking guy behind me and not a squid!"

"Ooh, he does look like a squid," Donna, with a look back at the guy, claimed, "Like Davy Jones fucked an Ood!"

"Like… _what_?" The Doctor, who'd been talking with Leela at that time, looked over to the two Earthlings, catching the end of it and wondering what the heck they were talking about that involved 'Like Davy Jones fucked an Ood'.

"What? C'mon, you can't say he _doesn't_ look like that!" Donna stated wildly, indicating the tentacle-ey man behind them as she looked to the Doctor.

"You're lucky his species has really bad hearing," The Doctor said, though grinning; his companions, all three of them, were utter nuts… but he loved them.

* * *

"I don't really want to," As they approached the front of the line (finally… crowded much, Rift Rides?), Leela began to say, about doing the stuff for The Challenge right now.

"Well we've still _got_ the free passes, no law that says we have to do stuff on _every_ ride," Donna, trying to ignore the cameras that hovered ten feet above them, but still ending up giving the silver spheres a small glance, said, "Because I don't really want to do it either, right now."

"Oh good," Sharada, sounding relieved, added as well, on the same wavelength about this, "I mean who said we had to _win_ the competition, it's enough we're in it, 'trying'…"

"Right, bet loads of people never win," The Doctor agreed, "And as long as we do one… at some point… eventually… they can't fault us for just being really incredibly bad at it!"

At that, the four of them, once at the part where the ride operator (for The Regal, it was a pretty alien girl with lengthy pink hair and glittering opal-tinged skin) checked for tickets, simply each flashed their 'The Challenge' token, getting on for free, no questions asked.

* * *

"So, what d'we do we do about –those–," Sharada, with a point upwards at the four spheres that hovered ten feet in the air above their heads, asked to the Doctor, sometime ten-ish minutes later, upon getting off of the 2nd coaster, just conveniently nearby the first, that they'd used the tokens to get onto for free, "Can you, like, sonic them to go away or something? I mean no one's _checked_ that they're still following us when we show the tickets."

"It feels like we're being watched," Leela commented, eyeing the small silver globes with suspicion.

"We _are_ being watched," Sharada said, "They're like the annoying security cameras when I used to stick leaflets in the furs and on turkeys and stuff. I actually got caught doing it once. Safeway, they _suck_," She exclaimed with an exuberant grin.

"What'd they do to you?" Donna, who had no honest clue that Sharada was, at one time, an activist (and damn good at it), asked her, wondering if she'd gotten arrested or anything for it.

"Nothing, they just told me not to," Sharada shrugged, "But I wouldn't've even cared though if they'd banned me from the store, I mean I don't even shop there. I'm surprised I never actually _got_ in trouble for any of it, cuz I did that for _years_. Still might, sometime again. Only stopped when I got to Uni cuz I was bored've it and I didn't want people to get the wrong impression of me. Load've help that was," She brightly laughed slightly, in sarcasm, saying this all very fast, "People still think I'm dumb nomatter what, so I don't even care. Dunneven know why I stopped, cuz I met like three friends at orientation and they were veg, too." She smiled, remembering this. She actually liked orientation, back nearly a year ago in August, a lot, thinking back to it, when university was all new and exiting… before, um, she found out that she was the purest of purely shit at university-level academics.

"You know, I find it so hard to really imagine you getting banned from anyplace," The Doctor said, in a sort of surprised amused tone, to Sharada, as they walked, "You're so…"

"Good?" Sharada supplied, to the comment about assuming that she was kind of well-behaved, "You'd be so surprised, when I want to, I can really-" It was at just that moment, what with the way she was kind of turned around and not looking where she was going as she talked, that she accidentally walked into half an exit pole, which she didn't quite trip over, though her expression on her face was suddenly of clumsy surprise.

"You're so ditzy," Leela smiled laughingly at the fan's ungraceful exit and random nature.

"It's almost like you're-" Donna, agreeing with Leela about Sharada, began, a look of realization forming upon her suddenly, "you _are_, aren't you?! You're American!"

Sharada smiled, though neither denied nor confirmed this observation.

"She's from Canada, Donna," the Doctor said, "Her accent-"

"Well yes, she _lives_ there," Donna said to the Doctor, with a look of 'it's so obvious', "And says 'car' like a Newfie, but I'm telling you, she _is_ American!"

"Right, and the fact that when I first noticed that she was from Canada, she didn't say she wasn't…" the Doctor began on.

"But did she say she _was_?" Donna asked.

The Doctor, thinking back to it, had to admit Sharada didn't really say for sure either way, she'd just started going on about her accent.

"Is this the same as the 'she's from 2008' thing?" the Doctor asked Donna, wondering if the only reason she thought that Sharada was American was because she'd read her mind back in New York.

"Well you've done the whole Time Lord-ey thing," Donna said to him, pointing out that she wasn't the only here who'd ever read Sharada's mind, "_Is_ she just Canadian? Because I don't think she is."

"I… I wasn't looking for that, it never came up," He said, Sharada's nationality (or nationalit_ies_, as Donna was claiming) not crossing into the part of her head that he'd looked into.

"Well it never did for me, either," Donna confirmed, "I just think she is. Seriously though, ten quid, Sharada's American."

"Only ten?" the Doctor egged.

Leela, who quite honestly was rolling her eyes at this point, as she and Sharada (who, of course, knew which one of the two was in the right about this, but was pointedly just staying silent at the moment) watched them, spoke up.

"And neither of you have just _asked_ her where she's from, _why_?" Leela said towards the Doctor and Donna, eyebrows raised in curious, and slightly impatient, amusement, as the Doctor and Donna glanced at each other after she'd said this.

"Okay, where _are_ you from?" Donna asked to Sharada, finally.

"I'm…" Sharada began, sounding like she was just on the verge of saying whether or not she was American as well as Canadian, though her gaze purposely darted over to where she'd earlier seen a small Rift Rides souvenir shop, like the shops on Main Street in Disneyland, "Going to go buy souvenirs, figure it out yourselves."

And with a concealing smile, Sharada, with Leela deciding to go check out the shop as well with her, set off in the direction of the store.

"That is so fail," Sharada grinned, a look of 'SRSLY?' on her face, once presumably out of earshot of the pair, as she and Leela wove their way through the thick crowds.

"So who's right though?" Leela asked Sharada.

"Both of them, I guess," Sharada told Leela, with a slight shrug, before putting on a fake Irish accent that Leela, unlike the Doctor, or possibly Donna if she'd seen Philosopher's Stone (which Sharada didn't know), didn't really get, "Me mam's American, dad's Canadian."

"So you are American, then?" Leela looking over to Sharada as she pushed open the shop door, asked her.

"Yep, land of the brave, home of the free." Sharada, looking at a rack of 'Rift Rides' branded hats and t-shirts, said, "I'm both; born in Seattle, but I've lived in Canada my whole life. I think that's what Donna meant though, that I'm duel? Oh, I don't know."

"So why didn't you tell them?" Leela asked her, flipping over a small 'Europa' snowglobe with interest, watching the 'snow' and sparkles settle on the mini replica of the moon and its theme park with more fascination than anyone who'd lived on Earth really would've.

"Dunno," Sharada shrugged, slipping a thin silver and dark purple bracelet onto her wrist to try it on, "Cuz they're crazy…," She said with a small laugh, taking the bracelet off and trying on a necklace with a blue and yellow pendant in the shape of a mountain peak instead, "and I wanted to see how much they'd end up betting. I think I'm gonna get one of those," Sharada pointed to the row of the slowglobes by Leela.


	4. Chapter 4

_#5: The DoctorDonna have sex in some very weird places. ("Er... that's a -ghost- moaning, kids...").  
_

Walking through the lane, somewhere maybe a short block away from the street that Leela and Sharada had disappeared off to, the Doctor glanced to Donna at the slight face she made whist biting into one of those cinnamon-sugar fairground mini donuts that they'd just bought a small bag of off a stall selling them.

"Bit undercooked," Was all she said, the yellowish fried round being kind of still really raw and the wrong kind of doughy in the middle.

"And yet we're still eating them," He commented.

"Yeah… do you want the rest? I really don't think I can eat any more of these…" She offered him, about a fourth of a small white paper bag of the undercooked fairground donuts still remaining.

The Doctor, who had contributed to eating half of the slightly raw mini-donuts, shook his head as Donna tossed the remainder of the bag to a nearby rubbish bin.

"I do think you're right," the Doctor said, suddenly, to Donna.

"Right about what?" she asked, not knowing quite what he was talking about, as she looked around at the Europan amusement park.

"About Sharada, that she's also American," He said, "You're good at that whole 'reading people' thing. Really good. Brilliant, actually."

"Thanks," She smiled to him for a moment, secretly happy that he considered her to be brilliant, even if she thought that it was totally obvious (to her, anyways) that the fan had roots in the USA. "Guess you owe me that ten quid, then," She teased, playfully nudging his shoulder with her own.

It was at that moment, blindsiding both Donna and the Doctor, that a young woman, around her early twenties with chin-length dark brown hair and large hazel eyes, came straight up to them, looking slightly reluctant before boldly snogging the Doctor senseless.

"Who the hell is she?" Donna managed out, asking the dazedly confused Doctor, just after the brunette broke off from the unexpected kiss.

"Woohoo, Challenge number 69… completed!" The brunette exclaimed accomplishedly, turning away to head back to her tall honey blonde friend that stood off to the sidelines while she did this task.

Hearing this, Donna dug out the copy of the The Challenge list from her jeans pocket, glancing down at the one the girl had mentioned.

"_69… 'Kiss a guy while his-'_," She began to read off, then stopped, in look of pure 'you're kidding me', "I'm not his girlfriend, _so_ not his girlfriend…" Donna denied towards the brunette.

"Oh… well, it still can count," The brunette looked slightly crushed, "You _could_ be. Oh, please just say you two _are_ together… I want to win this _so_ badly."

"Does anyone here know what we're playing _for_?" Donna asked, this occurring to her just now.

The brunette thought for a moment, and then shrugged.

"No, but it has to be something really good if they're keeping it such a secret," She said simply.

"Oh _that's_ logical," The Doctor muttered, sarcastically, though only Donna heard him, as the brunette hurried off to go finish up the list with her friend. "Best logic in the world, 'it has to be a _good_ thing that we're blindly competing for'."

"Thought you were the one who _wanted_ to try out The Challenge?" Donna looked to the Doctor.

"Out of curiosity," He shrugged.

"Why does _everyone _think we're a couple?" Donna wondered, a glance at the thick alien crowd that the girl and her friend had disappeared off into. "I mean, even Sharada bloody _ships_ us."

"Well I can see why," He said, with a slight shrug, "Well, why Shar thinks we should be together, not why random strangers think we are. Fans have been shipping me with every companion under the sun for _decades_. Did she ever mention Tegan? Or Romana?"

"The flight attendant and the Time Lady? Yeah, they came up in the wardrobe," Donna nodded. Though she really had no idea who either of those people were, Sharada did mention them a couple of times when she saw some of their old stuff in there. "_Speaking_ of the wardrobe… what the hell were you thinking with that _coat_? Did you just used to distract the aliens with all've the shiny bright patterns while you got away?"

She was looking at him in a sort of teasingly challenging expression, the kind that said, 'I adore you, but you're completely mental sometimes'.

"Guess the whole 'two suits' thing isn't that bad in comparison, eh?" The Doctor, who was wearing the blue one at the moment, said with a grin at Donna.

Beside where they were at now, there was one of those 'Haunted House' things, the kind where spooky props and costumed actors jump out at you as you walk through. The lineup stretched long, but it wasn't going through it that was on Donna's mind when she saw it, the Doctor, and his two suits, sounding definitely not bad at all right now.

"Supposing we were 'together'," She began, saying to the Doctor, with a certain glint, "About what would ten quid worth get me?"

"Oh, if we were 'together' it'd be way more than ten quid's worth," He told Donna, the same kind of glint about him as well, nearly ebbing with desire. They were _always_ way more than ten quid's worth when they were 'together'.

Around the side of the Haunted House, he spotted a door, which they quickly made for, the cameras, thankfully, as Donna had no plans on being featured on some alien porno site, not following into the door after them. He'd not just hardly shut it again behind them when, through the dark of the area of the haunted maze that they'd entered, the Doctor felt the warmth of Donna's curves pressing against his body and clothes began to shed quickly to the wooden floor of the space just behind the walls of one of the horror sets as he trailed a flutter of tantalizing kisses with his tongue, starting from her neck just behind her ear and reaching down the skin of her buxom body.

* * *

_#6: Oh, shit, something wants to kill us again... what a surprise._

Over in about the center of the park, built several dozen feet underground, an smart-looking female alien, of the near to the same species as the ticket-seller, Brinker, was seated at a large desk filled with about twenty or so monitor screens.

From behind the slightly reptilian, greyhound-like alien, who went by the name of Rukki, a red-skinned cycloptic man spoke up.

"The vendors are running short of power," The one-eyed alien, Pohmeisersylis, or 'Pohme', told the other, bossily, "We need more stock for the Oct-O-Squeeze."

"I've been keeping watch, but they are not in the right formation," Rukki responded, "Their party would take too soon of notice."

Pohme glanced past Rukki, and towards the screen to her left, which was divided into four video windows, on which a heavily abbreviated sticky note was stuck to, labeling it as '3H, 1NH: Cue look to the 2EH- Bl/Br h & Rd h', whatever that meant, though, of course, The Challenge's surveillance workers did know what those were code for, and to whom it referred to.

"Well, the first opportune moment, do it. We can't risk a shutdown," Pohme ordered, before turning away to exit The Challenge's surveillance room.

"And every time I keep wondering why it is that we cannot find some other method of feed," Rukki muttered with a sigh as Pohme left, staring back at the image of the dark blonde/light brunette in a tank top and jeans who stood in a short line with a copper-faceted brunette in animal skins.

"Oh yeah, I'll tell you something," Rukki began to sing an old song from Earth, Across the Universe's version of it, half-heartedly under her breath, "I think you'll understand…"

It was just then that the third and fourth quarter screens, having been stalled at an image of the side entrance of the haunted house for the past twenty or so minutes, came back to action, and Rukki watched as the two other people in that team, the redhead and the man in blue pinstripes, came out of the door, looking slightly ruffled, but immensely satisfied.

She couldn't do this anymore, she just couldn't, Rukki thought, tears leaking down the yellow-green skin of her face, which she hastily wiped away with the back of her palm, trying to compose herself.

"It's just a job, you don't _know_ these humans," Rukki told herself, taking a deep breath, trying desperately to get her thoughts away from the guilt that was wracking her. Her large eyes, framed by a pair of glasses, looked away from the four-quartered screen and to the post-it tacked at the top.

'2EH- Bl/Br h & Rd h'_…_ _They had_ _names_, Rukki thought, bitterly. The cameras did not transmit sound, but she knew what they were due to the fact that she'd gotten rather good at Humanoid lip-reading at her time in this job.

It was the closest that she'd get to the right moment anytime soon, though, with the pair of the Doctor and Donna looking at different food stalls, and the other half of the group, that of Leela and Sharada, walking together towards their direction, but looking in touristy awe at other things, instead of each other.

"I'm so sorry," Rukki whispered, nearly trembling as her hands came to a panel of dials and buttons. Her lizard-like eyes misted and she bit her tongue to keep it together as, with a final push of two small black doorbell-sized buttons, she set the corresponding beams into action, "So completely sorry, Sharada Storm and Donna Noble."


	5. Chapter 5

And just like that, it was dark. Sharada looked around, her eyes wide, though she saw nothing through the dank blackness. The fairground smell of fried food, cotton candy, and cinnamon sugar donuts had vanished, replaced by a foul stench that hung in the air like over-ripe seafood.

_What… the hell… just happened?_ Panic began to set in as she realized that, not only was she most likely not in the same place she'd been two seconds ago, but her arms and legs seemed to be restrained by a thick metal-feeling something, and she was pinned against some wall somewhere.

"Doctor?" Sharada hissed out in a low whisper. She heard silence, save for a disconcerting rumbling sound in the distance. "Anyone?"

A flash of light to her left suddenly illuminated a tiny part of the room, showing a glimpse of slimy cement floors littered with piles of what she seriously hoped weren't human skeletons. In a blink, the flash of light was gone, and once again she was plunged into utter darkness. This time, there were the unmistakable sounds of someone else in the room, their breathing coming from very closely on her left-hand side.

"Hello?" Her heart racing, she whispered, towards whoever it was. She hoped it wasn't the same person who brought her here, poised to kill and devour her or something.

"Sharada?" A flood of relief shot through Sharada, as the person replied; it was Donna.

"Oh my God, it's _you_!" The fan exclaimed, graciously thankful that it was someone she knew. "I thought it was some cannibal or something. There's human bones on the floor, I think… where's the Doctor?"

"He's not here?" Donna responded. Registering the fishy scent of the room, she made a face of disgust (which, of course, Sharada could not see through the dark), "It bloody _stinks_ in here… Are we in the warehouse of some Europan fish market, or something?"

The same rumble as before sounded in the not-so-far distance, seeming closer than before.

"I think something wants to eat us," Sharada said, with a slight nervous laugh. She was terrified, even more so because she couldn't _see_ whatever it was that wanted to make lunch out of her. She strained against the restraints, but they wouldn't budge.

A deep roar resonated through the room, coming from the same place as the rumbling had.

"Energy… needed," A toothy, deep, male voice growled hungrily. "Delicious… energy…"

"Why does _everything_," Donna pulled on the metal chaining her to the brick-ish wall, but was having as little luck in freeing herself as Sharada was, "want to eat me?"

"Earth… humans…" The unidentified creature in the dark growled again. From out of nowhere, an unseen, sticky, wet tentacle brushed the side of Sharada's face.

"Get off me… ugh, get off me!" Sharada thrashed her head around, making an uncomfortable and distressed noise like a piglet being squashed, trying to shake off the tiny suckers which kept clinging to her skin. She wanted badly to kick whatever it was in the head.

"Oi, leave her alone!" Donna had no idea what was attacking/touching/tasting Sharada, since she couldn't see the light brown haired fan at all through the dark, nor whatever had been growling, but the smell of rotting fish grew more intense. And just as suddenly, Donna, too, felt the feel of a sucker-filled tentacle feel its way onto her face without warning. "So, you're a giant… squid… thing…" She breathed, tensing at the unseen, but fully felt, large tentacle. She wasn't so sure if they were food, or at the beginning of a Hentai film.

"You…So much closer…" The tentacle-ey creature spoke hungrily again, towards Donna, as another of his octopus-like tentacles pressed up along her arm. She tried to shake it off, to no avail. "Such… delicious… energy…"

"Closer to _what_?" Donna inquired. "And if you don't get your slimy tentacles off of us-"

Interrupting her, Sharada, directed her attention to the creature, whose tentacles were wrapping themselves further across their flesh.

"Hey, you! squid-thing!" She called out to it, desperate for some answer as to why they, out of every possible person in the theme park, had been transported here. Why did things keep going after _them_? "Where are we? And get _off me,_" She demanded. "What do you _want_ us for?"

He made no noise of answer, continuing to growl hungrily and encase them in tentacles, like a possessive kraken.

"_You heard her_," Donna glowered at it, bossily. "You _do speak_, we've heard you, so tell us! What am I 'closer to'?"

The creature still didn't reply.

"If you don't answer, I am _not_ afraid to make sushi out of you!" Donna continued to press on. "Or calamari. I think you'd go great with _batter_!"

"With… what means?" He spoke, the end of a tentacle playfully fingering the metal that bound her right wrist to the wall. "… your voice?"

"You are _so_ brilliant," Sharada, struck by an idea, said towards Donna. She glanced down through the dark at wherever she felt the closest tentacle to her mouth was; this was so, so disgusting…

As she sunk her teeth into the rubbery flesh of the sea creature, it bellowed and recoiled slightly, in pain. Then, one of its large sucker-filled tentacles swung back towards her, a rush of air blowing past her as it blindly moved to retaliate, but punched into the wall instead. Brick and plaster crumbled down the balloon-sized gap that was now dug in the wall, in the space in-between Sharada and Donna. Tiny pin pricks of light shot through a few cracks, where it had nearly broken through the wall completely.

"What did you do?" Donna, looking at the dent, asked Sharada.

"_Bite it_," Was Sharada's reply, indicating the creature's many tentacles.

"What?" She looked slightly repulsed by the idea. "I'm not putting that thing in my mouth!"

"D'you want to get out of here?" The brunette fan to her right pressed, just before biting into another of the tenticles.

Donna nodded. Reluctantly, she cast around for the closest tentacle to that hole that she could reach her head to and bit down hard on it. It had the rubber-like feel of a raw piece of calamari, and tasted as awful as it smelled.

Both of the beast's offended tentacles recoiled back, and then slammed into the spot in the wall where the other had, aiming for their heads or bodies, most likely, but narrowly missing. The hole crumbled again, spraying bits of wall everywhere as it deepened and widened. Again, they sunk their teeth into whatever tentacle on the side of their bodies that they could reach and bent out of the way as he hurled them back towards them, pounding into the wall. This time, they were greeted by a flood of light into the room, the hole between them cleared completely through to the other side.

They finally saw what the gigantic sea creature looked like. It was giant; the as big as a small house, at least, and had long blue tentacles that spread out in every direction like octopus-shaped meatball on top of a bowl of spaghetti. Two milky white eyes sat above a large mouth that was lined with rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth the size of picket fence posts. For half a moment, they just stared at it.

Tugging at the manacle that bound her right arm, Donna found it finally came free of the crumbling wall, the deep bolt sliding out easily. The metal was still hanging round her wrist like an uncomfortable bracelet, though, but it didn't matter; they could get free of the wall, now.

The octopus-like creature still trailed its thick tentacles around Donna and Sharada, as they yanked themselves free of the dilapidated wall, but he seemed to be avoiding touching any parts of them that were in the light that came from the room on the other side of the thick wall.

Whacking and kicking its remaining tentacles off of their bodies with now freed limbs (albeit adorned around their wrists and ankles by the thick circular bronze-colored cuffs that seemed to have no way at all of coming open), they managed to clamber through the gap to the other side. They came into what looked like a hallway in some kind of laboratory, with crisp white walls and spotless steel flooring. There was also a strange feeling that the were underground.

"I can't believe we got away," Donna, looking back to the wall, as they came away from it, said, sounding incredibly relieved.

"Me neither," Sharada said, some mix of proud and delighted and terrified at the same time. "I wonder where we are?"

"Dunno," Donna shrugged, with a look around. Her eyes fell back to the slightly shorter light brown haired girl. "You have so much wall in your hair."

Shaking her thick ponytailed brown hair from side to side, Sharada smiled and looked to Donna, who had an equally large mess of crumbled wall pieces in her loose ginger 'Planet of the Ood-style' waves.

"So do you." She replied. It was at that moment that the two of them hugged each other, in a kind of 'what the fuck kind of awesome did we just do there?' embrace, so thankful that neither of them was the sole 'Earth Human' here with the Doctor at the moment.

Suddenly, Sharada felt something metal poking against her back, which was definitely not from the bronze-hued circular metal around Donna's wrists, nor was it a tentacle. It felt a good deal like what she'd imagine someone pointing a gun at her back would feel like, and she felt the uncomfortable feel of eyes boring into her from behind. Looking up, she saw that they were surrounded by about a dozen different aliens, each pointing a high-tech gun-looking thing in their direction. _Oh, shit_.

"Freeze exactly where you are," One of the aliens, a tall, red-skinned, Cyclops-eyed man, ordered. He had one of the guns pointed into Donna's back, and gave a large sniff of the air. "_Earthians_."

**A/N: Yay! Bet you thought I'd NEVER finish this fic! Hehe, I don't know if I even did, either, but I started working on it again finally, cuz I've had the plot in my mind for freaking ages, and I'm loving writing it :D **


	6. Chapter 6

"Are they being punished, for not following the rules of The Challenge?" A few minutes earlier, Leela suggested. She and the Doctor had found each other, but both had noticed the sudden disappearance of the person who'd been with them, at the time, and neither had any idea why or where Donna and Sharada had gone.

"Nah, if that was the case, we'd be taken in along with them," the Doctor dismissed. "But they weren't even together in the same spot; they were in two _completely different places of the park_… think… what would make someone want to target Sharada and Donna, but not you or me? Did Sharada do anything to particularly offend anybody, while you were with her?"

"No," Leela shook her head, not coming up with any arguments that Sharada had started or anything. "Not on purpose. … What about that man behind us in line, with the tentacles on his face? You said he couldn't hear well, but they were both a bit loud… "

"Well, they're only human," the Doctor shrugged. Then, a dawning look of realization fell into his face. "Human. Oh, that's it! Of course it's it! It's so simple!" He exclaimed wildly. "Sharada Storm and Donna Noble are both Human Beings."

"But so am I," Leela looked to the Doctor, slightly confused. "I didn't disappear."

"Yeah, but you didn't grow up on a planet which has a rift in time and space running through part of it," The Doctor answered. "So does Europa, actually. Only, here they figured out how to harness that rift energy to power things… such as, this place." He gestured at the amusement park around them. "But what if they didn't have _enough_ energy… they'd start looking for other things with a bit of rift energy in them to help fuel it, including, human tourists from Earth."

"Humans?" A look of fury was growing on Leela's face. If they'd hurt either of Donna or Sharada, there would be hell to pay. "But how do they know who's from Earth and who's not?"

Her eyes, as well as his, followed upwards to the obvious answerer; the silver, orb-shaped, cameras which hung over them in the air.

"They've been watching us." He concluded. "You know, I never go asked to be in The Challenge the first time I was here. I've been here once before, on my own, it's a bit rubbish going to amusement parks when you're just by yourself… but I met a few people, as I always do, and there was this one couple from Earth that said they were on something called 'The Challenge'. Funny, I never did actually see them again, after that… figured they'd just left, actually," He pondered.

"So, they only ask people who have Earth people in their groups to be on The Challenge?" Leela questioned. She dug out her token from where she'd kept it, looking at it curiously. "We need to get to the headquarters and offices of it, then," She said, decisively. Looking around, she saw no such thing that looked like the building of anyone in charge. "Where would that be?"

"Same place they keep them on Disneyland," The Doctor said, "Underground. Come on, I think I think I know where the entrance is."

He hurried off, Leela keeping up at his side, as the two of them ran and weaved through park-goers and vendors. Leela had to admit, she'd sort of missed this whole 'running around on foreign planets' thing, since she'd been on Gallifrey.

"Just like old times, isn't it?" the Doctor smiled at her, as they reached an unremarkable blue-grey metal door in the side of a small building near the front gates. He buzzed the sonic screwdriver at the lock, and the door came open. "You and me, sneaking into someplace we don't belong to save lives."

A long stairwell was on the other side of the door, leading downwards. As they began to venture down the stairs, Leela looked over to the Doctor.

"I'm still leaving, at the end of the day," She told him. "It's been fun, I've loved being with you again, and Donna and Sharada are just wonderful… but I can't stay any more than Sharada can, and I don't want to." Leela affirmed. "It's time I set out to travel the stars on my own… well, I hope to find who I'm looking for along the way… I do think she survived the war as well, don't you?"

"Oh, I think it's possible," He agreed. "Somewhere, in some universe or galaxy. Who knows? Stranger things have happened than Romana being alive, somewhere."

"Good," Leela smiled. She drew out her knife from its holster, baring it fondly. A strange banging sound rattled the walls from down below, for a moment, then ceased. "Now to go stick this in the neck of whoever's got Sharada and Donna."

After rushing down a few more flights, they came to another blueish grey door, this one unlocked. It lead into a long hallway, with steel flooring and crisp white walls. It was straight, on the side opposite to them, but forked off a few yards away on both ends.

A clamor of voices and footsteps could be heard faintly down one end, and they dashed in that direction, following the sound around more bends, hoping they were on the right track and wherever Donna and Sharada were wasn't in the completely opposite direction.


End file.
